Local zoning is a cornerstone of Maryland housing development and preservation, ensuring orderly hyper-local land use across its diverse urban, suburban, and rural landscapes. Bolton Hill today exists as it does because of a variety of local issues, opportunities and challenges. While current law delegates zoning authority to local jurisdictions, the proposed Starter and Silver Homes Act (HB 239/SB 36), pending in the General Assembly, seeks to preempt these controls by limiting minimum lot sizes and setback requirements to increase resident density.
Maryland’s shift toward statewide mandates reflects trends in California, Oregon and Florida, which have passed laws that preempt local zoning. Oregon legalized multi-unit homes on single-family land, and Florida’s Live Local Act allows massive multifamily projects in commercial zones without public input. However, real-world results in these states have been described as modest, complicated by local legal battles.
Available research indicates significant uncertainties regarding actual cost reduction – which are the repeated justifications for this ‘one size fits all’ approach to local housing issues. Upzoning does not guarantee affordability; instead, it frequently moderates costs for higher-end rental units while offering no significant relief for low-income households. In some cases, adding supply has even been associated with increasing rents in surrounding low-income neighborhoods due to “amenity effects” that attract wealthier residents.
A major impact of these reforms is the potential to transfer ownership to corporate investors who renovate them and utilize evictions to increase profit, causing these properties to lose affordability for individual homebuyers.
Maryland’s local zoning remains vital to ensuring that housing growth is thoughtful and locally informed rather than a blanket mandate. Although BHCA has taken no position on this state bill, it has weighed in to oppose loosening local zoning restrictions in a bill pending before the city council (Council 25-0066) that would make it easier to carve single residences into up to four units.
Neighbors are encouraged to learn more of the Starter and Silver Homes Act of 2026 and make your views known. (See the legislation details and Full Bill Text.)
Local zoning surely can be done better. Zoning that ignores critical local (and even hyper–local) neighborhood character causes significant issues. Zoning directives, particularly when applied State-wide, however well meaning, are blind to local character and are not the way for sustainable change.
— Dolph Druckman, ddruck@gmail.com
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